There will be talks, workshops and moderated discussions on specific topics of interest with John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker, Dmitry Orlov (that's me), Gail Tverberg, Thomas Whipple and others.

Here are my talks:

I. Slowly at First, then All at Once:
Progressing toward Collapse

It seems counterintuitive to most
people that highly optimized, integrated, technologically advanced,
progressive, mechanized, automated, highly efficient systems are far
more fragile and far more prone to sudden failure than low-tech,
localized, labor-intensive, inefficient ways of getting things done.
But in fact striving for higher efficiency, be it labor efficiency or
energy efficiency, is a way of coping by increasing complexity (and
fragility) in order to be able to operate on a thinner and thinner
margin. Once that margin disappears altogether (due to resource
scarcity or when other limits are reached), or when the costs of
complexity come to exceed its rewards (due to diminishing returns)
then it is suddenly game over (a.k.a. "systemic failure",
or collapse). I'll cover some theory on the subject (a light,
non-mathematical treatment) and then talk about some examples: the
electric grid, big box retail, centralized internet-based services,
global finance, container shipping, air travel, etc. In each case,
I'll try to show what a scaled-down, non-fragile, resilient
substitute might look like, and try to outline some steps that can be
taken in that direction.

II. Our Brave Experiment: Living Aboard
a Sailboat

Some years ago I started thinking about
the importance of bringing back sail transport. I put my thoughts
together in an article titled The
New Age of Sail, which has been called my “manifesto.” In
it I described the sort of sailing vessels that could be quickly put
together and operated in a resource-scarce and chaotic environment,
in spite of problems such as lack of highly trained crew, lack of
dredging and channel markers, coastal erosion putting destroying
dockside facilities and global warming putting them underwater. I
further expanded on this topic in a later article, Sailing
craft for a post-collapse world. In the meantime, in keeping
with a time-honored scientific tradition of experimenting on oneself
(and one's family), my wife and I purchased a sailboat of the sort I
described, moved aboard, and have spent a total of about three years
living aboard and sailing up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the US.
In the process, I was able to verify, by direct experience and by
observation, everything I wrote in the above two articles, with one
exception (it turns out that small sailboats can't outrun
hurricanes). Along the way, we discovered a great deal about the pros
and cons of minimalistic living. In this talk, I will discuss the
role of sail in our future, and also share our experiences of living
on the water and extrapolate them to life on land.

III. Sustainable Living as Religious
Observance

Our understanding of the world in
crisis has become increasingly compartmentalized and fragmented:
there is scientific analysis, cultural criticism, political
discourse, discussions of economics and finance, community
organizing, survivalism and a mystical/spiritual approach, to name a
few. There is only one type of institution that can transcend all of
these boundaries and provide the basis, the motivation and the
discipline to create and to perpetuate a sustainable living
arrangement, and that is organized religion. It is also the one
institution that has the political power to stand apart from the
mainstream and to refuse to adhere to the standard set of practices:
from the Amish ability to exclude invasive or oppressive technologies
through their Ordnungen, to the Christian Scientists'
successful refusal of medicine, to numerous other exceptions from the
status quo. There simply isn't time to evolve a new set of resilient
and sustainable social institutions from scratch, while the vast
organizational possibilities offered by religion are simply too
important to ignore. It is hard to imagine a religion, from primitive
animism to pantheism to Islam, that is dogmatically opposed to living
in harmony with nature. It is a question of emphasis: a charter
entered in addition to, rather than instead of, existing religious
observance. On the other hand, sustainability is no more a specific
religious choice than is survival. A spiritual approach to
sustainability is valid, but, at the same time, so is a perfectly
practical, if not to say materialist approach to the question of
using a religious orders as an organizing principle around which
sustainable communities can be built. Rather than present a lot of
material on this topic, I will attempt to paint a broad outline, and
then open it up for what I hope will be an interesting and fruitful
discussion.

4 comments
:

I watched a film tonight, "The Army of Crime", about a group of Jewish and Communist resistance fighters in Paris during the Occupation. A heroic but tragic story but what stood out most of all for me was how quickly people sold one another out,how isolated the victims of the Nazi's quickly became. One high ranking SS officer congratulates a French police official on an enormous roundup of foreigners and notes that not a single German was involved, it was completely managed by the French police and citizens.

After the movie finished I came across these two articles...more than a little too close for comfort in my book:

This is the terrain we will have to navigate after some kind of decline. Whether it's catastrophic or creeping, the good ole U.S.A. already has the cultural infrastructure in place to become a dystopian nightmare...semi-feudal, barbaric towards outsiders, superstitious and violent.

And sorry for posting this again but please do not hesitate to sign (and forward) a call to French presidential candidates "mobilizing society in the face of peak oil" originally published March 22nd in lemonde.fr.

Signed by :Pierre René Bauquis - Former Director of Strategy and Planning at TotalJean-Marie Bourdaire - Former Director of Economic Studies at Total, former Director of Studies at World Energy Council (WEC)Yves Cochet - European Deputy, former Environment Minister.Jean-Marc Jancovici – Consultant, energy and CO2 issues, ASPO FranceJean Laherrère - Former Chief of Exploration Technologies at TotalYves Mathieu - Former Hydrocarbon Reserves Project Manager at the Institut Francais du Petrole (French Petroleum Institute)

Translation published on Energy Bulletin :http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-29/mobilizing-society-face-peak-oil-call-french-presidential-candidates

And on a dedicated site (with petition/join the call functionality) :http://tribune-pic-petrolier.org/mobilizing-society-in-the-face-of-peak-oil/Any language welcomed for the message

more to disseminate the info about it (peak oil, or ressource limits in general) than anything else in a way ...

Dear Dmitry, I agree with everything you say but as a complexity scientist I must point out, you misuse the term complexity. When economic efficiency is increased, systems don't become more complex, they become rather less complex. So WALMART is a much less complex system compared to a network of mom and pop stores. It is also a much more fragile system, completely prone to collapse at the slightest shock. Complex-adaptive systems like eco-systems for instance naturally strive for sustainable development. Economics and its pursuit of efficiency stand in direct contrast to that bias. Complexity involves functional redundancy and decoupling, both of which are inefficient. In fact, one of the major failures of economics is its inability to understand complexity. Complexity sciences hold as much promise in transforming the dominant intellectual paradigm as does organized religion in providing a more sustainable narrative to believe in.